


Intervening Years

by myrtlebroadbelt



Category: Lost
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26626969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: Juliet leaves the island on the sub in 1974.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 9





	Intervening Years

Juliet has to leave. She owes it to herself.

She imagines staying, living in another one of those yellow houses for a while and dying in the Purge. Or maybe surviving it, then getting to be sixty-something and seeing her younger self step off the sub. Maybe she was Amelia from book club this whole time.

The thought is enough to push her down the last rungs of the ladder.

There’s a woman in the berth across from her, wearing a casual dress and a bandana over her blonde hair. She introduces herself as Olivia and assumes Juliet is a new recruit.

“Leaving so soon?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly supposed to be here in the first place.”

Olivia raises an eyebrow, and Juliet repeats Jim LaFleur’s lie.

She tries not to think about how upset he looked when she said she was leaving. How hard he tried to get her to stay. How she kind of wanted to, despite herself.

“You should stay with me,” Olivia suggests as one of the jumpsuits hands them their tiny cups. “Until you can get back on your feet.”

The offer seems too good to be true, but Juliet’s not really in the position to say no. It certainly makes the juice go down easier knowing she won’t be stranded in Tahiti when she wakes up.

While they’re waiting for the sedatives to kick in, she asks where they’re headed.

“Portland,” Olivia says, and Juliet bursts into laughter.

Olivia’s mother faints when she answers the door.

She’s been gone for three years, and they had no idea where she was, and it all hits so close to home that Juliet can’t help but cry along with them. She imagines knocking on Rachel’s door in Miami, hugging her like Olivia’s hugging her parents.

Then she stops imagining it, because she knows now that it will never happen.

Olivia’s parents seem wary of Juliet, and she can’t really blame them. But they let her stay in the spare room, and Olivia lends her some clothes to wear. The peasant blouses and bell-bottom jeans make Juliet feel like her own mother.

It’s not long before she has to admit that she has no money, no family, and no identification. She feels helpless, like she’s back to crawling around Ed’s lab in the middle of the night. 

Fortunately, Olivia seems used to doing things under the table. She doesn’t ask questions, just takes Juliet to visit a friend who makes fake documents. 

When the guy asks what last name she wants to use, she says Burke, figuring it’ll separate her from her younger self. When he asks for her birthdate, she nearly says her real one, and has to quickly do the math in her head.

“Thirty-four is nothing to be ashamed of,” Olivia says, thinking that’s why she hesitated. 

That’s when Juliet remembers it’s July. She considers it a small victory that time travel has shaved a few months off her age.

She needs a job, but she draws the line at forging a medical degree. Her time on the island already made her feel like a failure — she doesn’t want to feel like a fraud, too.

“What are you good at?” Olivia asks one day as Juliet is poring over the classifieds.

She’s not used to being anything other than a doctor. Or a researcher. Or a student intending to be a doctor or a researcher. 

She tries to think of something else she can do. Something actually useful, since firing guns and dodging pool cues probably won’t get her very far around here.

When it hits her, she has to force herself not to sneer.

“I know Latin.”

The next day, Olivia returns from her teaching job and hands Juliet a flyer advertising for language tutors. Within the week, she’s reciting declensions with fourteen-year-olds at the local library and pushing Ben’s smug voice out of her head.

If there’s one thing time travel hasn’t changed, it’s how quickly she falls in love.

She meets him at the library as she waits for a pupil who never shows up. They bump hands reaching for the same book, like something out of a cheesy movie. He likes science fiction and horror. She shows him _Carrie_ , which just came out.

“Stephen King,” he says, looking at the cover. “Never heard of him.”

They’re married before _Salem’s Lot_ is published.

Juliet calls it her fresh start. She thinks if she puts down roots, it will make it easier to accept that she’s never going back to where she came from. And for a year, she tells herself she’s happy. But it gets harder and harder to pretend.

“I’m from the future,” she says one night as they lie in bed.

He laughs, and plays along at first, thinking she’s just being funny. That’s when it all spills out of her, every preposterous detail, and he looks at her like he never has before.

She had thought, because of the books he read, that he might believe her. But few people are ready to accept that truth is stranger than fiction.

“You’re insane,” he tells her. “You need help.”

She tries to take it back, but it’s too late. He talks about having her committed. They’re divorced three months later.

At least she has a new name now.

She worries about them. The ones who stayed behind. 

She wonders if Locke ever came back, and if it even mattered. Did they get on the next sub, or did James buy them more time? Do they know about the Purge? She should have warned them before she left.

Or maybe she shouldn’t have left at all.

In the fall of 1977, she asks Olivia to connect her with someone from DHARMA. But Olivia agreed to cut all ties with the Initiative when she left. She can’t even tell Juliet where or when the sub will dock — it’s always different.

She tries to let it go, but she can’t stop thinking about it.

After piecing together what she remembers from the old orientation films, she calls the registrar’s office at the University of Michigan. They tell her they don’t know anything about the DHARMA Initiative. 

That’s what she gets for asking about a secret society.

She mentions Daniel Faraday, thinking he might have gone to Ann Arbor as a scientist. They tell her there’s no one by that name at the university.

“What about James” — she nearly says Ford before remembering — “LaFleur? Do you have any record of him?”

They don’t.

Juliet thinks about asking after Miles, or Jin, or any other name she can think of, but she knows she’ll get the same answer, and she’s not sure she can handle hearing it again. So she hangs up the phone and doesn’t call back.

She gets older. She lives alone. She makes friends, but it’s hard to get close to people.

Time goes on, like it already has. 

What Juliet never could have anticipated is the boredom. Once the novelty has worn off, she grows tired of experiencing everything again. She wants new history, new fashion trends, new movies at the cineplex.

At the same time, she wants the old things. The familiar things that don’t exist yet. Books that haven’t been published. Television shows that haven’t premiered. She wishes she wasn’t the only one who was nostalgic about the future.

She had thought leaving the island meant escaping, but sometimes she feels just as trapped.

As the new millennium approaches, she gives up on getting back to the island and starts thinking about how to stop herself from going in the first place.

She fantasizes about it. _Don’t drink the orange juice_ , she would tell her younger self. And then she'd close her eyes, and when she opened them again, she’d be in her old apartment in Miami with no memory of an island at all.

What stops her from going through with it isn’t the fear of meeting herself, or even the sound of Daniel Faraday telling her _whatever happened, happened_.

It’s the thought that if she doesn’t drink the orange juice, her sister won’t be cured.

She tells herself that maybe it wasn’t even true — they could have faked those medical records. Maybe Rachel’s cancer never came back at all, and it was just a scheme to get her to stay. 

She wants to believe it, but that’s one part of the future not even she can predict.

She toys with the idea of buying a ticket for Oceanic 815, wondering if she’d survive the crash. If she always has. Or always hasn’t. 

When the day comes, Juliet does get on a plane, but it lands safely in Miami.

She sits down on a bench in Acadia Park and watches the playground. It only takes twenty minutes for them to show up. She can’t see them as closely as she did on the monitor at the Flame, but at least they’re real this time.

Juliet thinks about going over, telling Rachel everything, cracking some joke about how she’s the older sister now. Or maybe waltzing up to Richard — lurking nearby with his camera — and demanding he take her back to the island. For what, she can’t decide.

(Kill Ben, warn the survivors, stop John Locke from blowing up the sub in three months.)

But she doesn’t do any of that. She just sits there.

She’s waited thirty years to end up in exactly the same place. Watching from a distance. Wishing she could go home.

On New Year’s Eve, she sits in her kitchen alone with a bottle of rum, remembering a blinding light and a vanishing beach camp. When the ball drops on TV, she starts crying.

There’s only one of her now. It’s too late to change things.

Juliet’s seventy when she retires to Albuquerque.

As a kid, she would have given anything to live in the same place for this long. But after decades in Portland, she needs a change of scenery. The world is finally new to her again — she might as well see a little bit more of it.

“Why Albuquerque?” asks Olivia, who has just become a grandmother.

Juliet shrugs. “It’s the first place I thought of.”

She feels like there must be a reason for that, but she doesn’t understand what it is until a few months later.

It figures that she would move to a new city and end up spending most of her time at the library. She’s used to it after years of tutoring, and she likes reading the new releases, now that she actually can.

She’s on her way in one afternoon when she stops short and stares across the lobby.

Standing over by the vending machines, in jeans and a leather jacket, is James Ford.

He’s hardly aged a day — a few years at the most. Certainly not thirty. 

There’s a little girl with him. She looks to be about eight or nine years old, with long blonde hair and a pile of books in her arms.

“Tell you what, Clementine.” He takes the books from her and adds them to the small stack he’s already holding. “Get yourself an Apollo while I switch these out.”

James balances the books in one arm as he reaches into his pocket for a dollar bill. The girl smiles, and Juliet’s breath catches when she sees the dimples in her cheeks.

A daughter in Albuquerque. It was in his file, way back when.

Juliet stands still, unsure if she’s waking from a dream or falling into one. She wonders what could have happened after she left that would make this possible.

If she’d stayed those two weeks like he asked her to ...

She watches James carry the books up to the front desk. He doesn’t notice her — probably wouldn’t recognize her if he did — and neither does Clementine, who’s already on her tiptoes feeding the dollar into the machine.

She rocks back on her heels excitedly as the candy bar starts to move, and then her posture collapses as it gets stuck just before falling. 

If Clementine were a few years older, she would probably bang on the glass in frustration. As it is, she stares momentarily at the dangling bar, and then looks toward the front desk like she’s waiting for her dad to come and fix it for her.

Juliet has no idea what possesses her to approach the girl.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she offers gently. “If you unplug it, and then you plug it back in again, the candy just drops right down.”

Clementine glances uncertainly between Juliet and the vending machine.

“Here,” Juliet says, approaching the wall outlet. “I’ll do it, so you can’t get in trouble.”

She bends down, which isn’t nearly as easy as it used to be, and pulls the plug out. The machine stops its persistent humming, then starts back up when Juliet pushes the plug in again. She hears something fall.

“It worked!” Clementine exclaims, reaching to retrieve her candy bar. “That’s so cool.”

Juliet stands up straight and smiles down at the girl — this perfect encapsulation of James’ past and future all at once.

Much to her surprise, she doesn’t feel regret. It’s more like relief.

Maybe, in some strange cosmic way, her leaving the island is what made this possible. Or maybe it had nothing to do with her, and it would have happened anyway. But at least it happened.

At least _someone_ got to go home.

Juliet walks away as Clementine tears open the Apollo wrapper. As she heads for the fiction section, she sees James coming toward her with a stack of new books in his hands.

She looks away from him, but she can still see his double take out of the corner of her eye as they pass each other. Juliet keeps walking, even though she knows he’s stopped in his tracks. She can feel his eyes on the back of her neck.

“You coming, Dad?” she hears Clementine ask.

“Yeah, sorry,” says James. His voice is distant as he adds, “Thought I saw somebody.”

Juliet doesn’t look back.


End file.
